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Tag Archives: conscientious objectors

I spend so much time celebrating the courage of soldiers that some might wonder where the old peacenik had got to. (If some old classmate from Binghamton stumbled here, e.g., what they might remember most is my play Too Many Martyrs, a melodrama about the U.S.-to-Canada draft resister underground railroad.) But as I construct my Civil War narrative, I’m also cheered to report some appropriately complicated pacifist characters, whose deep abolitionist beliefs made them conflicted about what was that century’s “good war.” An early glimpse:

Jesse Macy, who may have invented the character of CO medic. Offered the role of cook and horseman when he shared his membership in the Society of Friends, he refused, insisting he would train and travel with his unit only if he could work for the Army surgeons, and thus help care for the war’s relentless casualties.

George Garrison, who after the Emancipation Proclamation went so far as to enlist and become an officer with the Massachusetts 55th Division of the United States Colored Troops (USCT). Thus breaking the heart of his father Lloyd, the renowned abolitionist, (note to picky historians: I know the Garrisons weren’t exactly Quakers, but Lloyd himself characterized their paths as “nearly identical.”) Garrison endured enough rough strife to explain how afterward, despite numerous efforts to get him established in business, he drifted from job to job, interested mostly in veterans’ reunions. (Unfortunately for my narrative, he did not join fellow USCT veterans Charles Francis Adams and Lewis Douglass at the end of the century in the Anti-Imperialist League of America, also known as U.S. Out of the Philippines.

Of course, some were less conflicted, and offer more or less the classic Quaker story. Cyrus Pringle, whose travails in 1863 Vermont eventually came to the attention of Washington. Before then, as Wikipedia notes, “Refusing to perform all military duty, he was subjected to severe
discipline. The Friends were kept for days in the guardhouse in company
with drunks and criminals. Finally, on October 3, 1863, at Culpepper, Doctor Pringle was staked to the ground, with his arms outstretched and his legs cruelly racked; he was left in this position for hours, until ‘so weak he could hardly walk or perform any exertion.’ He was even threatened with death if he would not give up, but his only reply was, ‘It can but give me pain to be asked or required to do anything I believe to be wrong.’ After a day of extreme pain he wrote in hisdiary, ‘This has been the happiest day of my life, to be privileged to fight the battle for universal peace.’ “

These ghosts mingle with those whose journeys had nothing to do with Quaker qualms, sharing their horror at the blood soaked into the ground during those grueling four years. And — just as much earlier and later – they didn’t inspire the kind of revulsion from their fellow soldiers that many civilians assume. Macy even writes that by the end, when he was standing up to his command just as his unit was joining Sherman’s march through Geotgia, his peers “had agreed to stand together in forcible resistance in case extreme measures were instituted against me. I could not ask for treatment more uniformly respectful and friendly than that which I received from officers and men alike in Sherman’s army while on the March to the Sea.” Integrity respected, perhaps above all.

Not so unlike the respect shown by Major William Kunstler to C.O. medic Lew Ayres during World War II, or by the anonymous soldiers in Baquba, Iraq, who shot surreptitious peace signs to the authors of the early underground blog Fight to Survive. I don’t mean to imply it’s all kumbaya, to minimize the real differences; but it’s kind of cool to see how long that respect has existed, among factions traditionally painted as enemies.